You think this season was bad?

Hurricane forecasters: 2006 will look similar

November 30, 2005|By James Janega, Tribune staff reporter

Hurricane forecasters Tuesday welcomed the approach of December and the official end of the 2005 hurricane season--the worst ever recorded in the Atlantic--then turned immediately to preparations for next year and a dire warning to the public:

So far, 2006 in the Atlantic is shaping up to be every bit as bad.

At a news conference in Miami and Washington, officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration described the hyperactive 2005 hurricane season, which formally closes Wednesday, as essentially two full seasons crammed into one.

NOAA officials dismissed possible connections to global warming from greenhouse gas emissions as a cause for 2005's stormy weather. Instead, they blamed the year's severity on a broad cycle in which equatorial seas warm and cool every 25 to 30 years, as they have since at least 1870. Some scientists have looked at climate data to raise the possibility that global warming has been a factor. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Gulf of Mexico, for example, is as warm as it has ever been measured.

The current cycle of warming Atlantic water and stormier weather began in 1995, said Gerry Bell, NOAA's lead hurricane forecaster. It was made worse this year because trade winds that tear hurricanes apart were absent, he said.

The stagnant atmosphere allowed conditions for severe storms to form earlier in 2005 than in the past, while strong winds off North Africa pushed storms across the Atlantic more often. They arrived in the superheated Gulf of Mexico, fueling especially explosive storms.

"I would like to be able to tell you that next year will be calmer, but I can't," said NOAA administrator and retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher Jr.

No El Nino in sight

The best bet for a calmer 2006 season would be for the Pacific to warm up off the coast of Peru, forming an El Nino weather pattern that would stifle the growth of Atlantic hurricanes. But no such pattern is forming.

"What we know from our current climate patterns is that next year could be just as active as this year," Lautenbacher said.

In 2005, the Atlantic saw 26 named storms, 13 of which grew into hurricanes, a first since records on hurricanes have been kept. Of those, seven were severe, with sustained winds over 111 miles an hour. The previous record for named storms was 21, set in 1933, while the earlier record for hurricanes was 12, set in 1969.

Four severe hurricanes hit the United States, and three of 2005's storms were destructive Category 5 hurricanes, with winds stronger than 156 m.p.h.

As still another measure of how active the season was, so many big storms burst to life that weather officials went through their list of English names and had to resort to using the Greek alphabet--a first since they began naming storms a half century ago.

The warmer-than-average ocean remains so prolific that Tropical Storm Epsilon chugged to life in the mid-Atlantic on Tuesday, only 90 minutes before the news conference began, said National Weather Service director David Johnson. More tropical storms were possible this year.

Scientists pounce on '05 data

But as NOAA officials on Tuesday strung superlatives together to describe a season surpassing their worst predictions, weather scientists had already started reviewing studies from 2005, marking an enormous departure from past scientific efforts.

For years, hurricane researchers sought to predict storm paths with greater accuracy. But beginning with the 2005 season, NOAA wanted to know why Atlantic hurricanes have become so intense, and why there have been so many.

As hurricanes and tropical storms formed over the summer and fall of 2005, a corps of weather researchers flew more than 90 missions over the central Atlantic to follow them.

They trailed storms across hundreds of nautical miles, watching them grow into hurricanes that made devastating arrivals on U.S. shores. Altogether, they logged more than 900 flight hours and dropped thousands of instruments to measure wind speed and direction, Lautenbacher said.

Planes skirted the cores of immense hurricanes and traced outer rain bands in search of the forces connecting them to fast-moving eyewalls 100 miles away.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists in partnership with NOAA studied tropical storm formation off the coast of Central America and dry Saharan air blowing off the shores of North Africa, hoping to learn how tropical storms form and what may slow their growth.

Lautenbacher hinted at the costs of the extended operations Tuesday, saying NOAA had asked Congress for an additional $55 million in appropriations, in part "to make up for the expenditure of consumables and flight hours associated with a stronger and higher effort for the season," Lautenbacher said.

Bracing for next year

The 2005 season provided an especially intense laboratory for scientists.